Syndicated News

8 IoT Marketing Trends to Keep in Mind for 2019

As we move into 2019, we’re about to witness a substantial shift in IoT marketing.

With over 30 billion IoT devices expected to be in households and businesses across the globe by 2020, according to IHS Technology, 2019 will prove to be a very pivotal year.

IoT has already played a crucial role in delivering dynamic experiences. But as more devices enter the frame, marketers will eventually be able to analyze, forecast, and respond to ever-changing consumer behaviors in real-time.

In this article, we take a look at the most significant trends every marketer needs to be aware of as we approach the new year.

1. Big Data Will Continue To Get Bigger

As we see more devices become connected, brands will gain access to more data at an unprecedented level. According to a recent Ericsson Mobility Report, the usage of both IoT devices and sensors is set to exceed mobile phones, generating over 400 zettabytes (1 zettabyte is 1 billion TB) of data in the process.

With such large amounts of data being generated from these devices, marketers will be able to get a much more in-depth understanding of their consumers at each stage of their customer journey, from initial interest, right through to making their purchase. Plus, the data generated will provide marketers an insight into consumer behavior that usually isn’t declared by the consumer themselves.

2. Brands Will Deliver Hyper-Personalized Experiences

As brands attain more data on their consumer’s intent, needs, behaviors, desires and current location, it opens up the possibility of delivering highly relevant and contextual marketing messages at the most optimum time and place.

Also, brands will make use of predictive analytics and machine learning technologies to automate consumer data processing and deliver timely push notifications to their customers at scale.

Might I add that without predictive analytics, delivering personalization at scale is just not possible. Without it, marketers will have to manually go through the data and then map the relevant experience to each device. This is extremely time-consuming.

3. New Devices Will Emerge

The IoT-era has spruced up various connected devices, from Amazon Echo, Apple Watch, Google Home, to Alexa-enabled connected cars. We’ve even seen smart refrigerators that monitor milk-levels and automatically places an order when milk-levels are low.

In 2019, we will expect to see more everyday devices become connected. As Neil Patel, founder of Kissmetric, wrote in Forbes, the IoT-era will eventually transform the Internet to make it “ever-present”.

Also, the new IoT devices that will emerge will be mobile-first. During the early days of the IoT-era, many devices were built for desktop applications. But as of this year (2018), we have seen a shift towards mobile-first and mobile-friendly IoT devices. And with mobile already taking over desktop, the most logical thing for developers to do is to create more mobile-first devices.

With that, marketers will now have to focus their efforts on delivering their campaigns to mobile-first devices.

4. 5G Will Change The Game

The introduction of 5G will bring a monumental shift in communication networks right across the world.

To show you how monumental this is, take a look at the graphic below, which shows you the download speeds of 3G, 4G, 4G+, and 5G.

The download speeds of 5G technology will provide a much lower latency, thus creating a catalyst for next-gen IoT devices, in particularly VR/AR technology, which eats up large amounts of data.

5G will also play a crucial role in developing autonomous connected cars since they will need a consistent and guaranteed connection, which 5G will promise to provide.

At the moment, 5G technology is still in its early days. Countries like the US, South Korea, China, and Japan are expecting to launch 5G in early 2019. Samsung and Verizon have already announced that their latest model that will be released in 2019 will incorporate 5G technology.

5. There Will Be More Focus on Voice

The rising popularity of voice-activated applications like Amazon Echo and Google Home has drastically changed the way consumers are interacting with the Internet. According to comScore, voice search will account for 50 percent of all searches in 2020.

As consumers will turn towards using voice applications, more brands will deliver experiences to this particular channel. This is already evident with the number of Alexa Skills being developed. As of September 2018, there are over 50,000 Alexa Skills, which is a steep rise from the 30,000 Alexa Skills reported back in March 2018. It won’t be long until we see the 100,000 Alexa Skills milestone being achieved.

Pennsylvania-based Gettysburg College, a client of dotCMS, created their own set of Alexa skills to help students get a read-out of the daily lunch menu, retrieve staff contact details from the directory, and get the latest news.

Rod Todsten, VP of Information Technology at Gettysburg College, explained how Alexa Skills represents “a shift in the way that we have to think about content.” As voice assistant devices become popular, Todsten added that brands must move away from delivering content as a one-way communication, and instead focus on establishing a two-way conversation.

Voice will also drastically change how we implement SEO. As consumer use voice devices, they want to be understood in the first instance, and not having to repeat themselves. This is why more brands will invest in Natural Language Progression (NLP), sentiment analysis and AI to understand the consumer intent and automatically deliver the most appropriate response.

6. Security Measures Will Continue to Be a Top Priority

With brands having access to more consumer data in the new year, expect to see further privacy and security regulations come in. The introduction of EU’s GDPR back in May 2018 was a big wake up call for brands to be more responsible about their data handling practices.

And since IoT is expected to generate more data, these new regulations could restrict the amount of big data marketers and research companies can access.

For brands, it is imperative that they demonstrate transparency of their data handling procedures for their consumer and also enforce better practices, such as gaining visitor consent, to attain their consumer data through IoT devices.

In addition, we will also see further usage of biometric technology such as voice recognition and fingerprint ID to allow for secure access to confidential data.

7. More Brands Will Lean Towards Edge Computing

As more data is being processed, we will see an influx of data-related challenges concerning bandwidth and network speeds.

Traditionally, data retrieved from an IoT device is transported to the cloud for processing and then transported back. This model will not be suitable for handling the expected 400 zettabytes, as it will become overwhelmed.

In resolving this problem, more and more brands will resort to edge computing, which brings the data processing and analytics procedure closer to or on the device. It has been predicted that by 2020, 18 percent of the total IT budget will go towards developing an edge infrastructure

8. Headless Content Management Will Become a Necessity

To deliver your experiences to a multitude of IoT devices, it is critical that you invest in a headless CMS. Unlike conventional CMS solutions, like WordPress and Drupal, which comes with a frontend presentational layer that dictates and limits to where you can deliver your experiences, a headless CMS is built on top of a RESTful API.

This API-driven environment allows you to distribute your content, which is stored in the backend central repository, to literally any IoT device via API calls. This includes smart speakers, connected cars, smart watches, and devices which are yet to be released.

Plus, since the content is stored centrally, you can create your content once, and reuse it anywhere.

With consumers moving away from desktop, a headless CMS will give you the capability to deliver your experiences to mobile-first devices.

Be IoT-Ready With dotCMS

As more IoT devices will enter the market, brands will gain access to in-depth data that will enable them to deliver highly relevant and personalized experiences. But this can’t be achieved without a headless CMS.

This is where dotCMS comes in. dotCMS’s headless offering is unique to other headless CMS solutions on the market. As the most user-friendly headless CMS, dotCMS users can quickly create their IoT-ready applications in minutes, thanks to its drag-and-drop capability and easy-to-use inline editor.